In order to increase the resilience and reliability of our cloud platform we will be conducting network maintenance on 3/06/2015 between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., EST. During this time sites will be unavailable for extended periods of time.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to improve your experience.

Sincerely,

Remote-Learner Technical Support

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/02/25/moodle-maintenance-on-friday-march-6th-2015/feed/0Electronics and cold: A dangerous mixhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/02/16/electronics-and-cold-a-dangerous-mix/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/02/16/electronics-and-cold-a-dangerous-mix/#commentsMon, 16 Feb 2015 20:33:22 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=34994As we all endure these cold temperatures, it can be easy to forget that some of the stuff we carry with us is isn’t quite as hearty. Notably, electronics can be damaged quite easily and seriously in this weather. It’s not the cold itself that is always a problem (although it can be), but instead it’s the temperature change from cold to warm which triggers condensation inside the device.

That fogging of your glasses when you come in from outside is water condensing onto the cold glass surfaces. This same thing takes place unseen inside your phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, and other electronics. Because we all know that water and electronics do not play well together, this puts your data as well as the device itself at risk.

We would never try and use our device after it had fallen into water, but just coming in from the outside can result in enough water inside the device to cause the same damage. To the right you’ll see the result of actual water damage inside a MacBook… an extremely expensive repair (click the photo for a better view).

Condensation/water isn’t the only killer here. Cold batteries will die faster, cold hard drives can have trouble spinning and can damage your valuable data, cold LCD displays won’t look or function right, and the sudden change from cold to hot as internal components heat up when powered on can cause permanent damage. While too much heat can hurt electronics, too much cold has plenty of negative effects as well.

So… what to do to keep your device and data safe? Here are the best practices:

If at all possible, don’t let your electronic devices get cold in the first place. This means not leaving them outside, or in your car. If you have to carry your electronics for an extended distance from one building to another, bundle them up inside a bag as well as you can to insulate them from the cold. Wrapping them in a towel, shirt or blanket isn’t unreasonable given the bitter cold temperatures lately.

If it’s too late and your electronic device has already gotten cold, don’t turn it on. If possible, remove the battery since these days “off” isn’t really powered off. If you’ve gotten lucky and condensation hasn’t damaged it yet, the moment of powering it up and sending electricity through the entire device is the most likely moment of death. The safest thing to do is let it sit in a dry, room-temperature environment as long as you possibly can. Just because it has reached room temperature and is dry outside does not mean there has been time for all the condensation to evaporate inside. This can take hours. Obviously, prevention is more convenient and a much better option.

As always: make sure you’re keeping your data on Middfiles instead of storing your files locally on the device. That way if the worst happens and your device fails, at least your data is still safe. Just backing up once a week/month is still living dangerously: make Middfiles your default location for storing and opening your files and you’ll be protected in the event of this and many other things that can go wrong. More information at http://go/middfiles/ or http://go.middlebury.edu/middfiles/

Over the course of the next several weeks, we will be replacing the wireless networks at Middlebury. (UPDATE 03/02: The first change will take place tomorrow, 03/03, instead of today as originally scheduled. See the recent post for more details.)

What do I need to do?

Starting March 2nd, please connect to the new secure wireless network named MiddleburyCollege (like midd_secure but better). Middlebury Faculty, Staff and Students will login with your standard Middlebury username and password. Guests will need to create a Middlebury guest account and use it to connect to MiddleburyCollege. This is not a change for change’s sake – we are confident that the end result will be a wireless network that is more convenient and more secure for everyone.

Why are we doing this? What are we trying to achieve?

Some devices have trouble with the current configuration of midd_secure. Midd_secure was created many years ago and wireless standards have since evolved. Additionally, guests have traditionally connected to midd_unplugged, a non-secure network.

It is important that all wireless devices, including those of faculty, staff and students as well as guests, have a way to connect to our network securely, quickly, and easily. Also, as part of our improved security posture, and to comply with all regulations and generally accepted guidelines, devices on our network need to be identified and associated with an individual, for everyone’s benefit.

What will the new configuration look like?

Anyone with a Middlebury College username, including faculty, staff, students, etc., will connect to the new wireless network called MiddleburyCollege using their username and password. Guests will also connect to MiddleburyCollege with their guest account name and password, where they will have access to the Internet, but not our internal servers.

Guests from other institutions that are also part of the eduroam project will continue to connect to the eduroam network (for Internet access only).

Certain older or residential devices, for technical or procedural reasons, do not support standard security protocols (username and password), and require what’s called a “pre-shared key” instead (a shared password, like Midd-standard has now). For these devices, we are creating a limited-access pre-shared key network called MCPSK. This is only for devices that cannot use MiddleburyCollege. If you suspect this applies to you, please contact us (see “What if I have more questions?” below).

How will we get there? What is the transition schedule?

To reduce the impact of this change, we are planning on a phased implementation that gives people time to transition from one network to another. For performance and capacity reasons, we cannot have more than four different wireless networks at once, so we will introduce new networks on the following schedule:

Now to 3/2

3/2 to 3/09

3/09 to 3/16

3/16 forward

midd_unplugged (transition to midd_secure)

MiddleburyCollege

MiddleburyCollege

MiddleburyCollege

midd_secure

midd_secure (transition to MiddleburyCollege)

MCPSK

MCPSK

Midd-standard

Midd-standard

Midd-standard (transition to MCPSK)

GuestAccountCreation

eduroam

eduroam

eduroam

eduroam (unchanged – for guest access from other institutions)

Anyone currently connecting to midd_unplugged should take a moment now to transition to midd_secure. If you have trouble connecting to midd_secure, please contact the Helpdesk for the password to Midd-standard.

On Monday, March 2nd, midd_unplugged will be removed and we will introduce the new MiddleburyCollege network. From then on, all faculty, staff, and students should connect to MiddleburyCollege, though midd_secure and Midd-standard will continue to work for enough time to allow a smooth transition. We will prepare offices that frequently bring guests to campus to help them get connected to Midd-standard if necessary during this transitional period. In short, midd-unplugged will cease operating on 03/02/2015 – use midd_secure before then, and MiddleburyCollege after.

On Monday, March 9th, all College personnel should be connected to MiddleburyCollege, and we will remove midd_secure to allow for the introduction of the MCPSK network. Starting on this day, anyone who hasn’t been using midd_secure due to incompatibility should first see if they can connect to MiddleburyCollege. If your device doesn’t support it, please contact the Helpdesk so we can connect you to MCPSK. For most devices, switch to MiddleburyCollege before midd_secure goes away on 03/09/2015.

By Monday, March 16th, all individuals who have been using Midd-standard should have moved to another network, so we can remove Midd-standard and add GuestAccountCreation. To recap, switch to either MiddleburyCollege or MCPSK before Midd-standard goes away on 03/16/2015.

Other Frequently Asked Questions:

Are you saying guests will connect to the MiddleburyCollege network? Isn’t that a little weird from a security perspective?

There’s some behind-the-scenes magic there – people with Middlebury Guest accounts will be isolated from the regular Middlebury network and be provided with Internet access only.

Why start by removing midd_unplugged instead of another network?

For starters, it’s slow and insecure, but a good chunk of people keep using it, unaware that that’s the primary reason for their bad experiences. As much as possible during this transition, we want to make life easier for the people who are currently depending on the faster secure networks. We did consider temporarily disabling eduroam instead, since not as many people use it, but it’s part of an agreement with other universities and we want to honor that.

If I’m bringing a guest to campus after March 2nd, how can I make their experience easier?

The best thing to do is direct them to Middguests so they can create an account before they get here. Then, once they arrive on campus, they can immediately connect to MiddleburyCollege with their guest username and password. If they’ve forgotten their account info, once the GuestAccountCreation network is in place, it’ll provide links to help them reset their password or create a new account.

What about College faculty, staff, or students who’ve forgotten their password or don’t have one yet?

The GuestAccountCreation welcome page will also have a link to the password activation/reset page, and the Helpdesk phone number should anyone get stuck.

What if I have more questions?

If you have a technical issue, now or at any time, or if you need access to the limited MCPSK network, please make a ticket or call us at 802.443.2200 so we can assist you. If you have general questions about the plan, please post them here so everyone can see the answers.

Starting at 5am EST the Middlebury website, http://www.middlebury.edu, will be put into a read-only mode for approximately 5 hours for an upgrade. After the upgrade completes the site will be put into full read/write mode.

What’s available during this read-only period?: All publicly-accessible content on our website will be available. Links will continue to work. Drupal webforms are hosted on another site and can be accessed and edited as normal.

What’s not available during the read-only period?: Commenting on news stories, content that requires logging in before viewing, content editing on the main Middlebury website.

The hosted Hyperion and Banner applications, including Banner INB and SSB, will be updated and unavailable between 8am and 9am EST. The development environments for those services will be unavailable between 9am and 10am EST.

Middfiles, which includes Orgs, all Classroom, and home directory folders, will be rebooted and unavailable for approximately 10 minutes starting at 8am EST.

The Exchange email environment will undergo resource reallocations impacting 8 servers. The email environment is sufficiently redundant that we expect no impact to availability during this maintenance.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/02/05/systems-maintenance-sunday-feb-8th/feed/0Key Survey Downtime on Jan 17 for Hardware Maintenancehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/01/14/key-survey-downtime-on-jan-17-for-hardware-maintenance/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/01/14/key-survey-downtime-on-jan-17-for-hardware-maintenance/#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2015 18:59:03 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=34868The following information is important only for individuals having a Key Survey account used to create, distribute, and work with surveys and response data.

Please be aware that the WorldAPP team (our Key Survey host) will be performing needed hardware maintenance on this coming Saturday, January 17, 2015, between the hours of:

EST: 2 am to 7 am (GMT: 7 am to 12 pm)

During these hours Key Survey will be temporary unavailable.Once the hardware maintenance has been completed, all applications, survey and forms links, and reports will be available as usual.

WorldAPP apologizes for the short notice and will be happy to answer any questions you may have about this maintenance. Feel free to contact their Support Team via email (cs@worldapp.com), phone (781.849.8118), or live chat from www.keysurvey.com.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2015/01/14/key-survey-downtime-on-jan-17-for-hardware-maintenance/feed/0New Button Appearing in Your NExpress Search – Preview of new resource sharing service coming in January.http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/17/new-button-appearing-in-your-nexpress-search-preview-of-new-resource-sharing-service-coming-in-january/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/17/new-button-appearing-in-your-nexpress-search-preview-of-new-resource-sharing-service-coming-in-january/#commentsWed, 17 Dec 2014 16:18:03 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=34833Thanks to a new agreement with ConnectNY we will be expanding our direct request options beyond the NExpress consortium. Both systems retain separate databases; records aren’t shared between catalogs, rather searches are transferred from one system to another. NExpress has licensed Peer-to-Peer software to connect to the ConnectNY consortium. If a patron doesn’t find what he/she is looking for in the NExpress catalog, there will be a button in place to search for the item in the ConnectNY Catalog. If the item is found in ConnectNY, patrons will be able to place the request, just as they would place a request in the NExpress system. They will be authenticated with the appropriate user information and select a pick up location for delivery. While the ConnectNY search button is appearing now in the NExpress search, it will not be open for use by Middlebury patrons until we go live on January 22, 2015.

ConnectNY (CNY) is a membership-driven academic consortium in New York which currently includes 18 institutions. CNY’s mission is “to share collections, leverage resources, and enhance services through cooperative initiatives and coordinated activities.” All the academic libraries involved in ConnectNY share a common union catalog, powered by Innovative Interface’s Inn-Reach system. The combined collection that is shared by the members includes ten million printed books and an emerging collection of e-books.

Who are the current members of CNY?

Adelphi University Libraries, Garden City, New York

Bard College Libraries, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Canisius College Libraries, Buffalo, New York

Cazenovia College Library, Cazenovia, New York

Colgate University Libraries, Hamilton New York

Hamilton College Library, Clinton, New York

Hobart & William Smith Colleges Library, Geneva, New York

Le Moyne College Library, Syracuse, New York

Medaille College Libraries, Buffalo, New York

Pace University Libraries, New York, New York

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Research Libraries (RPI), Troy, New York

Rochester Institute of Technology Libraries (RIT), Rochester, New York

St. Lawrence University Libraries, Canton, New York

Siena College Library, Loudonville, New York

Skidmore College Library, Saratoga Springs, New York

Union College Library, Schenectady, New York

United States Military Academy Library, West Point, New York

Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, New York

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/17/new-button-appearing-in-your-nexpress-search-preview-of-new-resource-sharing-service-coming-in-january/feed/1Webmail’s New Look — Coming Soonhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/17/webmails-new-look-coming-soon/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/17/webmails-new-look-coming-soon/#commentsWed, 17 Dec 2014 15:05:04 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=34805The upgrade of our email environment over the holiday break will bring a cleaner, more minimal look to Webmail (also known as Outlook Web App – OWA), designed with “touch” devices in mind. The appearance of the Webmail login screen has already changed, but the workings once logged in will not change until after your account has migrated.

The most noticeable differences in Outlook’s new “face” are the shift of many buttons/links to the upper right corner and the fact that Public Folders are no longer accessible when using the Web App. You will be able to adjust many settings by clicking the Settings (gear) icon located in the top right corner (beside the ? icon).

It’s no secret the using charts and diagrams can make a big impact on your audience by visualizing your data and contextualizing the numbers by making trends more evident. What may be more secretive is how you can find and manipulate data points, and translate that information into a visual. This session will walk you through some of the options that are available to you.

We also have a number of seats still available in the following workshops that cover a range of topics, including browser-based video recording services, how the world perceives us on the internet, and opportunities to use equipment like the Leap Motion and Oculus Rift. Visit the DMBootcamp web site for more information.

The ITS-Information Security Roadshow is a conversational opportunity to discuss and learn about techniques and strategies to keep yourself safe while working on the internet. It also discusses both regulatory and personal reasons why information security concerns are important to both you as an individual and a member of the Middlebury community.

You will learn the basic tools, design concepts, and work flow needed to manipulate photos for your personal or project related use. Concepts such as selection, cropping, rotation, repair, scanning photos for use in Photoshop, and others will be covered.

This is an overview and demonstration of the scanners, plotter, and capture station located in the Wilson Multimedia Development Lab. You will learn the basics of how to operate these devices and the software associated with them.

What is information literacy, what skills do we want our students to have, and how do you fit in supporting it? What kind of support do librarians provide and how can you get help? Includes tips for searching for images and audio resources with Summon and Google.

“What is a wiki? Why would I want one? Once I’ve got it, how do I use it?” Learn the answers to these and other questions as we explore the platform that powers the sixth most popular website in the world. There will be a brief intro and Q&A, followed by a hands-on workshop session.

In this training session we will be focusing on the two most popular video cameras available to borrow through the Circulation Desk, the Canon Vixia and Canon XA10. We’ll cover menu options, preferred set up and exporting of files as well as basic trouble shooting.

Attend the iMovie training session to learn how to put together your own video using different components of the iMovie interface. We’ll cover audio, video and text editing as well as how to share your work once it is complete.

This workshop will teach you the basic functionality of Apple’s Quicktime, how to use SnapZ Pro to do a screen capture of video, and how to use features of MPEG StreamClip to view and convert video clips.

In this workshop, you will learn basic editing tools and design concepts used in desktop publishing. This program is used widely on campus from the layout of Middlebury Magazine to many publications produced by Reprographics.

Create beautiful online exhibits of your art or archival materials with Omeka, an open-source digital archival platform sometimes referred to as “WordPress for museums.” This workshop may also be of interest to faculty who would like to build digital archives or collections in their classes. (omeka.net)

With every click, post, tweet, checkout, like, search, digg, friend, tag and other activities we have created a record of our time spent interacting with web sites that are viewable from anywhere in the world. What do our web sites and social media activity say about us? This workshop will explore the meaning that others give to our online identities, and present some strategies for managing our identities in the digital space. NOTE: Attendees must be comfortable with having their name searched for.

WordPress is best known as a blogging platform, however its flexibility and ease of use also makes it a great option to use to display your digital work. Join us as we explore the best way to configure WordPress as a showcase for your expertise. Participants should come prepared with some ideas and materials that they wish to highlight.

From non-linear storytelling to rich, scholarly annotations, this workshop will encourage new ways of thinking about writing in digital environments. Using a web application called Scalar, you will begin to craft a media-rich digital narrative. Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways. (scalar.usc.edu)

In this workshop, you will learn to use basic editing tools and some fundamental design concepts. The workshop is taught as though it were a class teaching students to design a poster for a class or seminar. It is the same instruction that participants in the Spring Student Seminar receive.

Podcasts, interviews, sound tracks, and voice overs are examples of how audio makes an impact in media. We will introduce a few tools to help you sculpt the audible material for your multimedia project.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/11/digital-media-bootcamp-update-2/feed/024/7 exam hours for the librarieshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/01/247-exam-hours-for-the-libraries/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/12/01/247-exam-hours-for-the-libraries/#commentsMon, 01 Dec 2014 16:13:45 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=34747The Davis Family library is now open 24 hours a day through December 14th. After 11 pm, you will need your ID to access the building. The library will close at 10 pm on Sunday, December 14th.

Armstrong Library will have regular hours, with extended hours Friday and Saturday, December 12th and 13th (closing at 10 pm and midnight, respectively).